Senior Software Engineer, Toolkit

About the role

In this role, you will own the end-to-end evolution of the TimescaleDB toolkit, ensuring it remains a best-in-class resource for developers working with time-series data. You will act as a critical interface between raw customer workflows and the powerful hyperfunctions that live inside the database, translating complex needs into intuitive and reliable developer experiences. The position requires deep collaboration with product and sales teams to uncover real-world problems across diverse verticals such as industrial IoT, manufacturing, observability, and financial markets. You will be responsible for defining the toolkit's roadmap, identifying the next set of capabilities that will deliver outsized value to users. A core part of your work will involve balancing the urgency of new feature delivery with the necessity of maintaining long-term code quality, performance, and maintainability. Ultimately, you will ensure that the toolkit feels intuitive, stable, and built to last for years of production use.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Own the long-term evolution and strategic direction of the TimescaleDB toolkit hyperfunctions library.
• Define and prioritize the toolkit roadmap by synthesizing emerging customer needs from industrial IoT, observability, financial markets, and manufacturing domains.
• Partner with Product, Sales, and customers to deeply understand real-world workflows and translate them into intuitive developer-facing tools.
• Drive initiatives to improve reliability, testing, documentation, performance, and maintainability for new and existing capabilities.
• Balance the delivery of new functionality with sustained investment in long-term code health and technical excellence.
• Collaborate closely with the engineering organization to ensure toolkit changes integrate smoothly with the broader TimescaleDB platform.
• Investigate and resolve complex issues reported by users, turning observed pain points into robust and well-tested solutions.
• Evaluate and prototype new hyperfunctions and utilities that enable users to offload complex calculations directly within PostgreSQL.
• Advocate for best practices in developer experience, ensuring that the toolkit feels predictable, consistent, and enjoyable to use.
• Participate in design reviews and contribute to architectural decisions that impact the scalability and durability of toolkit components.
• Work across the full software lifecycle, from initial discovery and prototyping through to production-grade implementation and rollout.
• Mentor and support other engineers by creating clear documentation, examples, and guidance for using the toolkit effectively.
• Track and communicate key metrics related to toolkit adoption, performance, and user satisfaction to guide future priorities.
• Engage with the open-source community by contributing fixes, improvements, and insights back to the TimescaleDB ecosystem.

Requirements

• At least 2+ years of professional software engineering experience with Rust.
• Demonstrated experience contributing to open-source projects with a strong track record of reliable contributions.
• Built and shipped SDKs, client libraries, developer tooling, APIs, or platforms that are used by other engineering teams.
• Foundational understanding of statistical functions commonly used in time-series analysis, such as last observation carried forward.
• Solid grasp of database fundamentals including indexing, query execution, transactions, partitioning, and performance tradeoffs.
• Proven ability to work effectively in a highly collaborative, globally distributed engineering environment.
• Comfort navigating complex codebases and making thoughtful tradeoffs between competing requirements and constraints.
• Natural curiosity about how customers use software, with a habit of connecting observed usage to future product decisions.
• Strong written communication skills in English, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts and tradeoffs.
• Willingness to engage directly with customers and stakeholders to gather requirements and validate solutions.
• Experience implementing production-ready systems that emphasize reliability, test coverage, and maintainability.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities and deliver tangible progress in a fast-paced, outcome-driven environment.
• Commitment to following engineering best practices, including code review, testing, and documentation.
• Readiness to learn and leverage the PostgreSQL ecosystem and its extension model effectively.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience building databases, query engines, or data infrastructure products.
• Familiarity with time-series databases, observability platforms, or analytics systems.
• Background working with physical IoT systems, industrial software, manufacturing, or similar data-intensive domains.
• Significant contributions to open-source software beyond minor patches or documentation updates.
• Experience with distributed systems concepts and resilience patterns in cloud-native environments.
• Knowledge of modern frontend frameworks or visualization libraries that could enhance developer tooling.
• Exposure to monitoring, metrics, and tracing systems commonly used in observability platforms.
• Experience contributing to PostgreSQL extensions or working closely with the PostgreSQL optimizer.
• Understanding of data compression, encoding, and storage techniques as they apply to time-series workloads.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers or leading small technical initiatives.

Practical notes

This role is fully remote and open globally. English language fluency is required. We welcome candidates across time zones, and overlapping collaboration hours with a globally distributed engineering team are preferred rather than required.